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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/27975696">Pokemon Meta</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Friendly_Irin/pseuds/A_Friendly_Irin'>A_Friendly_Irin</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Meta - Fandom, Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Main Video Game Series), Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Fanwork Research &amp; Reference Guides, Media analysis, Meta, Nonfiction, Religion, Type Matchups, Worldbuilding</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-09</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-10 16:16:22</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,163</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/27975696</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Friendly_Irin/pseuds/A_Friendly_Irin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Meta, analysis, and assorted writing prompts and advice.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. What Are Pokemon? And Other Worldbuilding Considerations</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The question of what, exactly, pokemon are and how they work is a longstanding debate in the fandom. I've seen several worldbuilding primers posted to the archive, as well as several theories and headcanons elsewhere, so I think it'd be helpful to make a thread for this topic.</p><p>For me, I think the most important takeaway is that there's no one true answer. Thinking of this like a puzzle with an objective solution will just give you a headache. Like a lot of long-running franchises with multiple writers and producers, there is no consistent canon anymore. The portrayal of pokemon in the seventh generation is radically different from that of the first, to say nothing of additional media like the anime, Mystery Dungeon, and the upcoming Detective Pikachu movie. Like with so many things in art, you should start with what <em>you</em> want -- what themes and mechanisms would support the story you want to tell, or just which ones you think are cool. This need not even be <em>your</em> One Truth -- if your fanfic isn't the direct sequel to another, there's no need for it to operate on the same rules. Not everything has to exist in the same grand unified world.</p><p>To begin with, I think it's helpful to get a clear idea of where we're starting from. What's the canon? Pokemon seem to be basically animals with magic powers. Like real animals, they have an ecology, but the details are left to our imagination. The details vary, but they do seem to have familiar physiological needs and natural behaviors. They can all breed, eat, and interact with the natural world in consistent ways.</p><p>And that may be enough for your story. Don't feel obligated to overexplain or come up with your own elaborate thesis! If the exact nature of pokemon isn't going to be important to your story, you don't need to wring your hands over what voltorb eat or how gastly breed. Canon doesn't, and that's certainly worked out fine for it!</p><p>But the nice thing about fanfiction is that you can do your own thing. If you want to elaborate or make something different entirely, there's a lot of options.</p><p>You may have heard that some pokemon are based on creatures from Japanese folklore known as "youkai". An adequate translation of the term is difficult, as the classification is so broad as to cover nearly everything. Youkai can be kind or cruel, weak or strong, mundane or bizarre. The closest analogous term in our culture is probably the general "monster", or perhaps "faerie". They are frequently portrayed as literalized metaphors -- the love for an object may bring it to life, or a ghost may try to kill others the same way they died. But like any aspect of folklore this is, of course, a huge subject with multiple books written on the subject, so I can't give a thorough overview here. Pokemon's competitor <em>Yo-Kai Watch</em> uses 'mons that are explicitly youkai, so you can check that out to get a feel for them and see how they're different from pokemon.</p><p>Pokemon aren't really youkai, though. Youkai are strange, inexplicable, one-off manifestations, while pokemon are physical beings with clear ecology. But we can take elements of youkai to make pokemon more unique and the world more rich. Pokemon can perhaps be thought of as what youkai, or other forms of nature spirits, might look like if they operated under natural laws.</p><p>This cracks the floodgates wide open: under this interpretation, pokemon operate under a different system than real life, but one that still works under logical scientific rules. What is the ecology of fire-breathing horses? What are their physical needs? Do they feed on magical energy rather than calories? Are they affected by other forces than the physical, by belief and changes in nature itself? (Muk and grimer, which seem to literally be pollution brought to life, certainly imply as much.) These are fun questions to ask.</p><p>There's a lot of interesting stuff you can do with this. There's an audio drama I'm listening to, <em>The Magnus Archives</em>, that's a collection of horror short stories linked together by a metaplot. It quickly becomes apparent that the supernatural monsters seem to feed on human fear, and are thus driven to do scary things to cultivate it. On its own, that's a somewhat clever concept, but a rather open-and-shut one: these things still operate on rules we can understand, with fairly simple motivations. We know how animals feed and how predators hunt; it's straightforward to map those concepts onto these creatures.</p><p>So midway through, they throw us a curveball: <em>"No. They don't <strong>feed</strong> on it. They <strong>are</strong> it."</em></p><p>Suddenly, they're not so comprehensible. Suddenly, there's a lot more to ask and to explore. "Did these things pop into existence the first time something felt a fear, or are they why we're afraid?" It gets under your skin, forces you to look at the world in a new light.</p><p>This is the essence of what's called <em>magical realism</em>. It is the domain of literalized metaphor, of beliefs and abstract concepts being translated into physical manifestation. Most folklore, not just youkai, operates on this concept, and it's highly compatible with pokemon.</p><p>For instance: In gen 2 we're told steel-types are a recent discovery. This is obviously a cover for their sudden appearance, but if taken at face value, maybe they are the result of a reaction to humans' recent technological development? Worked metal is something you don't see in nature, but now it is everywhere. Maybe, like hermit crabs, steel-types are simply making use of this new resource; or maybe they are a reaction to this change to the natural order, using a new type of energy created by humankind's dominion of nature. They don't just <strong>use</strong> metal, they <strong>are</strong> metallurgy itself.</p><p>However, a possible disadvantage of magical realism is that it's rather humanocentric. Everything is an expression of <em>our</em> beliefs; the world is but a stage for our play. What if you want humans to share the spotlight? Then you could also lean into the animal interpretation, and <em>divorce</em> pokemon from us. Make them truly alien, with their own economy of physiological needs. Humans become foreigners, intruders into this system that already exists apart from us. That's useful for a story about the balance between civilization and nature and our responsibilities towards it.</p><p>Don't feel bound by any one interpretation. There are lots of competing fandom theories on this: There is the theory that humans are a naturally-evolved branch of pokemon that simply doesn't have powers, there is the theory that pokemon are aliens, there is the theory that <em>humans</em> are aliens, there are theories that one or both are aliens from completely other dimensions. All of these are valid concepts. The important thing isn't just how solid a theory is, but how well it suits your story. If your story is going to be about humans, a humanocentric world state makes sense; but if you want pokemon to be characters in their own right, making them all symbolic reflections of human ideas won't work very well, even if your theory is otherwise very consistent.</p><p>To use a specific example: There's a popular theory that ditto are the failed results of the Mewtwo cloning project. There's no concrete evidence for this, just a neat connection of various elements. A lot of people tend to take this as fact, but it needn't be. If your story requires ditto to have been around for a long time, obviously they can't have been created with Mewtwo; conversely, if your story is going to heavily focus on Mewtwo and the cloning project, it might be a very good idea to include. If you have some other idea for your story, then go with that. And if your story doesn't engage with it either way, you can just not bring it up.</p><p>Take anyone telling you there's one objective truth with a grain of salt. And please, please don't feel like you have to make pokemon "realistic". Pokemon is a fantasy story, for goodness sake! Have some fun with it.</p><p>For related discussions, see <a href="https://www.fanfiction.net/topic/216173/174005728/1/Pokemon-Intelligence">Pokemon Intelligence</a> and <a href="https://www.fanfiction.net/topic/216173/174099975/1/Pokeworld-Religion">Pokeworld Religion</a>. You may also enjoy <a href="https://www.fanfiction.net/s/11960983/1/Gods-and-Demons-ad-terminos-terrae">Gods and Demons: ad terminos terrae</a>, a story with extensive worldbuilding that makes pokemon into nature spirits with alien physiologies.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Pokeworld Religion</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>I've encountered one too many Biblepunk fics where Arceus is literally God, so I think it's time to say something about this.</p>
<p>Firstly, for the love of God, do not take Christian curses and find-and-replace "God" with "Arceus" or anything else. It makes as much sense as saying "Jesusdamned" or "Zeusdamned", and sounds godawful besides. Look up what curses were used by real-life polytheistic religions that cursed by specific gods. The Greeks were fond of "By Zeus!", though they also had curses based around shared cultural values: "To the crows with you!", for instance, demonstrates how important last rites were to them. Use a little creativity, and read your curses aloud to make sure they sound like something people would actually say on a regular basis. Alternatively, just say "God".</p>
<p>Secondly: Not everything has to be about Arceus.</p>
<p>Many fans, being from Christian-dominated countries, latch onto Arceus as an analogy for the Judeo-Christian God they're familiar with. But just because something is a creator deity does not make it identical to the Judeo-Christian God in all other respects. Using Arceus as a stand-in for God shows a willful ignorance not only of canon context, but of the many varied ways real-world mythology develops as well. There are lots of other possibilities you can and should engage with here.</p>
<p>To begin with, there is no reason to believe Arceus is worshipped at all. Almost all the other legendaries are mentioned as mythic figures, and some are explicitly worshipped in canon. Arceus? Nada. Sinnoh's populace and libraries make repeated mention of the creation trio, but give us nothing on Arceus. The most we get is the Sinjoh Ruins, which is an event location of questionable canonicity and, again, isn't mentioned anywhere else. Arceus' pokedex entries imply there is <em>some</em> mythology about it, but given they claim it "shaped the world with its thousand arms", that mythology is either very wrong or very metaphorical. Arceus worship has all the appearances of a dead religion -- it may have been popular once, but it's now terribly obscure if it exists at all.</p>
<p>Do you worship an obscure Japanese deity? No? Then the people of not!America and not!France probably do not think Arceus is the bees' knees. There are, what, over 50 legendaries now? Try a different one, and see where it takes you -- it could be somewhere interesting.</p>
<p>What <em>should</em> pokeworld religion look like, if it's not all Arceus worship? Real history tells us there are a lot of options. Creator gods are not always the focal point of religion, for one. Zeus not only didn't create the world, he actively rebelled against the gods who did! Conversely, Odin has creation among his portfolio, but he was not the original god, and most myths emphasize other aspects of his character. Arceus need not be head of the pantheon or even an important god at all. Everyone has their own myths, and those myths can be wildly different depending on cultural values. Abrahamic mythology is actually extremely unusual by the standards of most religions (there's extensive and quite interesting discussion about this in academia, you should read about it), so you should be aware that the questions and values emphasized by the mythology you're familiar with aren't going to be universal. Pokemon worship has much stronger analogies in naturalistic religions in our world, such as Shinto (probably not coincidentally the dominant religion of Japan), Wicca, Norse mythology, and other "pagan" faiths that flourished before Christianity ruthlessly stamped them out. High gods aren't the only ones that are worshipped there -- even if you do want Arceus to be head of your pantheon, specific groups will be more interested in other gods. Perhaps assassins pray to Darkrai or Yveltal, or farmers pray to Groudon and Rayquaza? Add some color to your canvas by showing what the little gods get up to.</p>
<p>Pokegods are distinct enough from any real-life deities that you can have many other interpretations, however -- I, personally, am quite fond of interpretations that treat them as alien, eldritch creatures with intelligence and powers beyond our comprehension, worshipped only by extremist doomsday cultists. Real-life mythology features cool monsters (indeed, many legendaries are based on them), but they were not often worshipped themselves!</p>
<p>In fact, who's to say religion needs a pokemon basis at all? The gods of real-world religions are intangible, their worship based on faith alone. People don't need a real, physical focus to form a religion, especially when we tend to prefer gods who are like us and not weird dragons. It is perfectly reasonable to bypass all of this by saying that a religion very much like the Abrahamic faith exists in pokeworld, and simply never came up in canon because it's not relevant to the plot. A little lazy, sure, but less awkward than fusing Christianity with one of the canon legendaries, and perfectly valid if your fic isn't going to touch on any of this and you just don't want to bother with it. I played with this idea in my fic <a href="https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12311847/1/Blood-is-Thicker-than-Water">Blood is Thicker than Water</a>, where Gladion, a mainlander, uses "God", while Hau, a native to the one region that clearly does have widespread pokemon worship, uses "the gods" when repeating the same phrase.</p>
<p>There are many options! Research, consider, postulate. Find what makes sense for your story. Above all, just think about what you're doing.</p>
<p>Addendum: For anyone who thinks Arceus is based on the Judeo-Christian God, here is an excerpt from the trivia section of its Bulbapedia page:</p>

<p></p><blockquote class="quoteStyle">
  <p>Arceus is particularly based on a creator deity, present in many world cultures. Arceus's stance and general form are similar to Egyptian bull and calf idols, particularly Apis. Based on its official artwork and attack movements in the 3D games, Arceus may be modeled after a horse or llama. The arc on its back may be inspired by the Dharmachakra, or the Bhavacakra, used to represent a concept similar to the reincarnation in Hinduism.</p>
  <p>The conception of the first god might be influenced by the Shinto gods Kunitokotachi and Amenominakanushi, who summoned Izanami and Izanagi to create Japan with the spear. It may also be a reference to the qilin, a Chinese mythical creature. Its myth is nearly identical to the Cosmic egg, found in creation myths of many cultures and civilizations. Arceus may also represent or be inspired by the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, who, in Buddhism, is either pictured with eleven heads and one thousand arms (the latter of which is mentioned in Arceus's Pokédex entry) or in a white, four-armed manifestation (which could look similar to Normal-type Arceus).</p>
</blockquote><p>Wow! So many mythological references! So none of them being Christianity! Why don't you check those out instead of assuming your culture has a monopoly on everything.</p>
<p>(Previous discussion can be found here: <a href="https://www.fanfiction.net/topic/11834/162324520/1/Pokeworld-Religion">https://www.fanfiction.net/topic/11834/162324520/1/Pokeworld-Religion</a>)</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Are legendary pokemon really divine?</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>My sister and I came up with an interesting theory about the legendaries:</p><p>Why should we believe anything we're told about them?</p><p>Fans have complained for years that pokedex entries are known to provide suspect, contradictory, or even outright false information. Why should we assume the legendaries' pokedex entries are any different? There's no reason to assume it's true that Arceus created the universe just because someone told us so. It is, in fact, more likely that the mythologies are simply humans' ad-hoc attempts to make sense of these powerful, alien creatures.</p><p>So, let's stick to what we've actually seen to be true.</p><p>Cyrus can destroy (or at least damage) the fabric of reality with the powers of the Creation trio. This is true. However, this doesn't actually tell us much — since Cyrus does not successfully destroy and remake the universe, there is no evidence that they have any positive effect on time and space. Certainly the universe keeps on trucking just fine regardless of whether they're here or in whatever place they were summoned from. You could reasonably make a case that they have a purely negative effect on reality — they seem to distort spacetime by their very existence, and in the anime at least, their fights with each other frequently bleed over to damage our world.</p><p>That doesn't seem to point to them being creators or stewards of spacetime, does it?</p><p>(We see something similar with the Lake trio, also. The mythology claims they granted humanity the gifts of their aspects, but also that interacting with them destroys said gifts. Once again, these beings seem purely destructive.)</p><p>Arceus can give birth to one of the Creation trio in the Sinjoh ruins. People say the cutscene implies it is creating a new universe to do so, but I don't think we have to assume that. After the cosmic slideshow, nothing happens except the creation of the new egg. All this proves is that Arceus is capable of creating the Creation trio, and that it draws on some cosmic power to do so.</p><p>Then Generation VII gives us the ultrabeasts.</p><p>Popular fan theory is that all pokemon are descended from or related to the ultrabeasts. I think this is a fair assumption, given that ultrabeasts operate on the same rules of combat. The ultrabeasts are very powerful, but appear dependent on the energy from Ultra Space; presumably, it is possible for them to adapt to survive in the pokemon world, but this causes them to lose some of their power.</p><p>Furthermore: Ultra Necrozma, Necrozma's natural form in Ultra Space, has a higher stat total than Arceus. That seems a little… odd, if Arceus is supposed to be the Supreme High God, doesn't it?</p><p>With all that in mind… Do we know of any pokemon with unusual powers, who only appear for short periods?</p><p>Why yes, it's all the most powerful legendaries. Even as early as Lugia and Ho-oh, they spend long periods disappeared or dormant, with bizarre powers even they cannot seem to fully control. Dialga and Palkia must be explicitly summoned from a mysterious other dimension through a method uncannily similar to how Necrozma is summoned in Ultra SuMo.</p><p>Top-tier legendaries are recently-adapted ultrabeasts. They have attuned to this world partially but not completely: they retain their reality-warping superpowers, but existing in this world is tiring for them, requiring hibernation between active periods.</p><p>The circle is completed if we assume that part of the ultrabeasts' powerset is the ability to spawn new ultrabeasts. This explains the Sinjoh ruins event, and would retroactively justify the "trio master" setup that's so common. This could also be why it was Solgaleo and Lunala specifically who held Necrozma's power and not any other ultra beasts, which I don't think was ever explained — they may well be Necrozma's spawn. (The cosmog birth event could also be taken as evidence of this spawning ability.)</p><p>Such "first-generation" ultrabeasts would naturally be a step closer to normal pokemon — less impressive abilities, but greater adaptation to the world. And well, what do we see among the minor legendaries? Lower stat totals, but much more accessibility, with no dormancy periods (off the top of my head).</p><p>Mew can be explained as the first ultra beast to cross over (successfully?). It has spent enough time here to adapt completely. If we can believe the tidbit about DNA evidence proving its connection to all pokemon, we can posit that it spawned all "normal" pokemon (or their evolutionary ancestors).</p><p>(Interestingly, this would imply that the Mew expies have different stories — Celebi and Jirachi fit the "more power, but less activity" model of the version mascots, while Manaphy's ability to breed with regular pokemon may imply a greater level of adaptation.)</p><p>Now if you want to have some nerdy fun, try speculating on everything's spawn lineage!</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0004"><h2>4. Holidays in the Pokeverse</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>This came up on Reddit, so I will crosspost it here.</p><p>'Tis the season, so I expect some of you will want to write Christmas fic or other holiday fic. Here are some factors you should take into consideration.</p><p>(I'll talk about Christmas specifically here since it's the biggest subgenre of holiday fic, but this can apply to most holidays in general.)</p><p>Firstly, I'm not saying you shouldn't write holiday fic at all, but keep in mind that Pokemon takes place not only in a different culture but in a completely different, fantastical universe. If they have the exact same holidays we have, that raises some <em>questions</em>, questions that will likely require very long answers. If you don't want to spend half your story on worldbuilding, you should consider that this is maybe not the best fandom for expressing this particular muse.</p><p>In particular, Christmas is a Christian holiday, so if you want to literally write about Christmas, you have to decide if Christianity exists in the Pokeworld. This isn't impossible, as there are several popular theories that the humans of the Pokeworld are expats from our Earth, but it will require a bit of explanation. If you want to write about a generic Christmas-like holiday, then that's also possible, but you'll need to add some stuff of your own. Many cultures have a winter solstice festival, as that's a very important event to agrarian societies who depend on a predictable climate and weather cycle to survive. It's common to have a big feast before winter as the last big meal you'll have for a while, and as a way to use up any excess perishables before you have to store everything for the winter. (Note, however, that all of this depends on the planet having the same climate cycle as ours, which the Pokeworld may not.) The exchange of gifts is more unique to Christmas specifically, but many holidays have elements of gift-giving or supporting the community, so it's not unreasonable to work it in.</p><p>The most important questions to ask are how want to make it fit into the Pokeworld. What sorts of traditions would arise from their culture that revolves around <strike>enslaving</strike> befriending magic animals to do everything for them? Is the culture we see in the games not how it always was? Perhaps the holiday celebrates an older historical tradition from pre-pokemon society? Are trainers expected to exchange gifts with their pokemon, or is that anathema because their culture depends on not viewing pokemon as people? Use this as an opportunity to be creative and portray well-known culture through an unfamiliar lens -- because otherwise, why are you writing a fantasy story at all?</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0005"><h2>5. Type matchup theories</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>An oldie but a goodie!</p><p>The types are one of the most interesting parts of Pokemon to me. Wildly different pokemon can have the same types, yet types always behave the same way. Fire is just as effective against sneasel as it is against cryogonal, despite one being a simple cold-adapted animal and one being a literal chunk of ice. You can dismiss this as mere gameplay abstraction, but that's so boring! I'm a big fan of the magical realism approach, and under that model, we can interpret the types to have metaphysical significance. A type can have many different manifestations, but at its core there's always something fundamental that makes it interact with the others in the exact same way.</p><p>The "natural" types -- fire, water, grass, electric, bug, rock, ground, and ice -- are fairly straightforward. Their interactions are intuitive extensions of natural laws. Fire burns plants, water erodes rock, etc. The only weird one is ground vs. electric because it's based on a pun rather than physical sense, but you could twist the symbolism to work -- thunderbolts come from the sky and are therefore associated with the heavens, so earth energy blocks it, or something.</p><p>Flying is a weird one, but I think we just have to accept it's really "bird" type with some wind magic retconned in when they realized they needed special attacks. (Interestingly, in Gen 1, the wind attack Razor Wind was Normal, not Flying.) Then the matchups make physical sense -- birds have fragile bones that are crushed by rocks, but they can fly out of reach of physical attacks, making them hard to punch with fighting moves. Flying creates are also more strongly affected by changes in weather patterns, so blizzards and thunderbolts hurt them more.</p><p>Poison is where things start to get interesting. The type ranges everything from venomous animals to living toxic waste. What is the unifying theme here?</p><p>What made this click for me was that acid is also a poison-type attack. Scientifically, there is <em>no</em> connection there to poisons; caustics and toxins are completely different compounds. But it <em>feels</em> right, doesn't it? Both things cause degradation and corruption. This is where a magical realism approach works to our advantage: we can lump related concepts symbolically even when they don't make sense physically. So let's say that's what the poison type actually is: the ability to cause corruption, decay, and decomposition. This is why poisonous attacks are their own type: the poison is magic, not a physical substance. This can also explain its weakness to psychic attacks: if psychic power represents a purity of thought and will, "mind over matter", it would naturally oppose the power of corruption.</p><p>We could also take a more realistic approach, and just say it's really a "chemical" type and its magic conveys the ability to manipulate chemical compounds. This is how they can make so much poison seemingly out of nothing and why they can also throw out other chemicals like acid. This also explains why the pokemon that are seemingly normal animals with venom glands are classed as poison-type and have the same vulnerabilities: they're making their venom magically. They're weak to Ground because earth is used to block and contain hazardous chemicals, and some types of clay can neutralize poisons.</p><p>From there, we move into the realm of the metaphysical types. How is "fighting" its own type of energy? Well, Japan has a strong honor culture and respect for warriors. Under that model, it's no longer so strange to think of "fighting spirit" as its own energy. A warrior's honor can be a tangible force that protects them from dishonorable thuggery (dark-types), and enables feats of strength beyond what is normally possible (crushing Rock and Steel while Normal is repelled). This is consistent with how fighting-type attacks have an aesthetic of technique and discipline (karate techniques, targeted strikes, etc.), while similar normal-type attacks such as Mega Punch are just brute force. However, this structure makes them predictable and therefore vulnerable to psychics.</p><p>I find Psychic to be an odd type, personally -- I feel like telekinesis and mind-reading are very different flavors of power. One is the ability to manipulate the physical world, and the other is the manipulation of internal thoughts; symbolically, those feel very different. We can perhaps say that it seems to be the power of <em>will</em>, that they can make things happen just by wanting them. This also ties into the repeated saying that psychic powers require immense discipline and can easily go awry. This allows them to be undone by things that unsettle them or erode their confidence -- icky bugs, scary ghosts, and demonic dark-types.</p><p>Bug is a pretty weird one too, if we're interpreting these as fundamental magical energies. It's easy to see fire and water as magical forces, but... bugs are just bugs. I like to interpret it as their power being one of "madness". Real bugs are very alien to us, and often drive people to irritation and frustration. If we extend metaphysical significance to that, Bug's connection to the other "mental types" makes sense. Their magical power is in the same field as psychics', but orthogonal, the disordered chaos to psychics' subtle manipulations. This would also explain what attacks like Bug Buzz and Signal Beam are doing, and why they're just as effective as physical attacks.</p><p>You probably already know that the "dark" in the Dark type is meant to be metaphorical and not literal; dirty fighting and savagery. What's interesting to me, though, is that dark-types seem to have an aesthetic beyond that. They really seem more like <em>demon</em> types if you look at the examples -- hellhounds, crows, pitch-black foxes, ice demons. Demons are often representations of the Id, of dangerous and indulgent emotions and desires. This matches up with special dark-type attacks like Dark Pulse, which are described as bursts of negative emotion. Dark-types could be the emotional counterpart to the logical psychics, explaining why they're able to unnerve them so easily. This also explains their weakness to Bug -- as highly emotional creatures, they're easily frustrated and just as vulnerable to madness. As to why they're immune to Psychic... well, because they were designed to counter psychics, obviously, but we could perhaps say they're some kind of "void" in psychic or spiritual energy that makes them impossible to read. All of these interpretations also explain why they beat ghosts -- beings of pure spirit would be vulnerable to negative emotions, and a spiritual void would also eat away at their being.</p><p>Ghost-type matchups are pretty well-trodden -- their intangibility makes them immune to normal and fighting attacks <span>which really means they should be immune to all physical attacks but those only got introduced later so oh well</span> but they can be attacked directly in the realm of the spirit, making them vulnerable to other ghosts' attacks. What's interesting to me are actually their <em>defenses</em>. They resist but are not immune to Poison and... Bug? Shouldn't they be totally immune to poison? Why should they resist Bug but not, I dunno, Rock? Maybe these are just game balance things because otherwise they'd have too many immunities. Take your pick.</p><p>Finally, Dragon is a weird one that becomes less weird if we look to the source culture. In Japanese culture, dragons are quasi-deities strongly linked to nature, so that's probably the model we should be looking at. It works quite well to explain the seemingly-bizarre decision to make Alolan exeggutor dragon-type: if that's exeggutors' preferred environment, we can see Dragon as a kind of "paragon" type, what pokemon become when they are closest to nature. Perhaps dragon-type energy is actually the closest thing to a "pure" form of the energy that powers pokemon. It would explain the type matchups: Dragon resists the starter types, showing its dominion over nature, and otherwise stands apart from the type chart rules, matched only by itself.</p><p>Their vulnerability to Ice is very interesting to me: it got me thinking that Ice may actually represent a kind of "death" type, opposed to the life energy represented by dragons. This would match with many pokedex entries describing ice-types as cruel and malicious, metaphorically cold as well as literally. Ice-type could represent more than just literal cold: it is starvation, deprivation, entropy.</p><p>Post your own theories here!</p>
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